Future of News or Human Services as Complex Organizations

Future of News: Television, Newspapers, Wire Services, Newsmagazines

Author: Philip S S Cook

Will shrinking budgets and growing competition force network television news to compromise quality? Can big-city newspapers improve circulation in the audiences advertisers want to reach? Will the wire services diversify into other areas of communications technology? What changes lie ahead for national newsmagazines? In The Future of News, top experts offer a probing analysis of the news business today and its place in American culture tomorrow. Charting the past decade's media trends, the authors show how an increasing segment of the population is rejecting broadly targeted media "packages" in favor of more focused, specialized information. Television network news producers, for example, face a growing viewer preference for cable news services, attention-grabbing local news programs, and lurid "infotainment" shows often broadcast by the networks' own affiliates. At the same time, urban newspapers and national newsmagazines are losing readers--and revenues--despite increased news and feature coverage and frequent graphic "makeovers." And the nation's wire services also face an uncertain future. Analyzing these and other trends, The Future of News offers a thoughtful and provocative preview of the media's role in the twenty-first century.

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Originating with commissioned papers presented at a conference held by the Media Studies Project of the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC, May 1989, addresses both narrow and broad concerns regarding the present character and future prospects of the news business. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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Human Services as Complex Organizations

Author: Yeheskel Hasenfeld

If you're teaching a course in human service management and administration, look no further than Human Services as Complex Organizations. Hasenfeld and an all star cast of contributors including Glisson, Grusky, Handler, Kirk, Schmid, and Tucker offer you a comprehensive, state-of-the-art view of human services as complex organizations. They incorporate recent theoretical and empirical work in the growing area of human service administration. Using examples from hospitals, schools, social service agencies, mental health centers, and public welfare agencies, the contributors address and examine common structural features. They offer illuminating insights into the morally charged nature of the work, women's predominance in the work force, staff stress and burnout, empowerment of clients, client-organization relationships, and evaluating organizational effectiveness. Human Services as Complex Organizations is the ideal text for courses in social work, nursing, public health, public administration, and education. "The book is well conceived and the chapters are well executed. . . . Yeheskel Hasenfeld has a fine theoretical sense and, to my mind anyway, excellent sociological taste. He gets the emphases just right as he turns sociological concepts to practical uses. He also has a fine sense of the architecture of organizational theory." --Contemporary Sociology "Yeheskel Hasenfeld's volume is a milestone along the road of developing a distinctive body of theory on the structure and functioning of HSOs. The interplay of the three theoretical perspectives is balanced by empirical work from a wide range of agencies. Issues of gender, empowerment of clients, racial and ethnic diversityall receive attention. . . . Indeed, the final section of the book on evaluation of HSOs should be compulsory reading for all who feel imbued with a mission to bring market values into the human sector." --Stan Lees, The Management School, Lancaster University "The opening papers by Hasenfeld on 'The Nature of Human Service Organizations' and 'Theoretical Approaches to Human Services Organizations' provide a superb introduction to a series of papers of equal and outstanding quality." --Journal of the Institute of Health Education "Hasenfeld's volume is a milestone along the road of developing a distinctive body of theory on the structure and functioning of HSOs. The interplay of the three theoretical perspectives is balanced with insightful empirical work from a wide range of agencies. . . . Indeed, the final section of the book on evaluation of HSOs should be compulsory reading." --The Occupational Psychologist "The conceptual framework for this reader is excellent. It provides a coherent perspective on the field of study. . . . No one in Social Welfare has a better analytic grasp of this field than Zeke Hasenfeld. His work is intelligent and of high quality." --Neil Gilbert, University of California, Berkeley "Twenty years ago it would have been hard to imagine a collection of this quality with so many fine contributors from academics in professional schools. The resulting volume represents the best scholarship in the service of social change." --From the Foreword by Rino Patti, University of Southern California

Table of Contents:

PART ONE: UNDERSTANDING HUMAN SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS The Nature of Human Service Organizations - Yeheskel Hasenfeld Theoretical Approaches to Human Service Organizations - Yeheskel Hasenfeld PART TWO: LINKING THE ORGANIZATION TO ITS ENVIRONMENT The Institutional Ecology of Human Service Organizations - David J Tucker, Joel A C Baum and Jitendra V Singh Nonprofit Human Service Organizations - Kirsten A Gronbjerg
Funding Strategies and Patterns of Adaptation Executive Leadership in Human Service Organizations - Hillel Schmid PART THREE: IDEOLOGY, PROFESSIONAL WORK, AND TECHNOLOGY The Ideational System of Social Movement Agencies - Cheryl Hyde
An Examination of Feminist Health Centers Professional Work - Andrew Abbott Diagnosis and Uncertainty in Mental Health Organizations - Stuart A Kirk and Herb Kutchins Structure and Technology in Human Service Organizations - Charles Glisson PART FOUR: WORKING IN HUMAN SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS Patriarchy and Social Welfare Work - Paula L Dressel Job Satisfaction in the Public Social Services - R L McNeely
Perspectives on Structure, Situational Factors, Gender, and Ethnicity PART FIVE: CLIENT-ORGANIZATION RELATIONS Power in Social Work Practice - Yeheskel Hasenfeld Dependency and Discretion - Joel F Handler PART SIX: EMPOWERMENT OF CLIENTS Empowerment, Political Analyses and Services for Women - Naomi Gottlieb Empowering Ethnic Minorities in the Twenty-First Century - Lorraine M Gutiérrez
The Role of Human Service Organizations PART SEVEN: THE EFFECTIVENESS OF HUMAN SERVICES The Effectiveness of Human Service Organizations - Thomas D'Aunno
A Comparison of Models Evaluating the Effectivenessof Countywide Mental Health Care Systems - Oscar Grusky and Kathleen Tierney